Back Bay Grouch: Hmmm, you are beginning to sound very Catholic. This is a common experience to intelligent men who, freed from the daily hubbub by age, turn reflective.
That depends entirely on which kind of Catholic you mean. I am rereading Lawrence Brown’s Might of the West for about the fiftieth time, and he makes a critical distinction.
My own observation: Erasmus supported Luther at the outset, but turned against him as he began to attack the Western unity represented by the Medieval Church. But at his death, he refused all rites, something a modern Catholic would NEVER do. This puzzles the hell out of Mommy Professor.
But Brown points out, and C.S. Lewis, who was an Anglican, indicated, that both the Reformation and the reaction to it, the Catholic Church hardened at Trent, were totally different from the united church in its Medieval form. Nobody raised on the Renaissance crap has the slightest idea what I am talking about.
The Medieval Church, as I said, regarded Renaissance witches as demented old women. They did not let Wordism blind them to reality. The Medieval Church would have had no problem with Galileo.
My interpretation of Brown and Lewis is that the Reformation got the entire church, both Tridentate and Reformation, tangled in the exact WORDS of the Bible and Tradition. Tradition is a living thing, not the locked-in wordism of post-Reformation Catholicism.
In short, Tradition is Western. Neither the Reformation nor the Trent Catholics nor Mommy Professor has a hint of what that means.
Erasmus was a part of the West, part of the Medieval Church, so he did not feel he needed the hocus-pocus.
These are thought-points, not doctrine.
#1 by shari on 11/24/2007 - 1:37 pm
I see what you mean. The church has always been under attack from every direction.
I became a Catholic a few years ago, but I couldn’t stay. Never felt comfortable with what I was hearing. I read a comment by an Ordained Permanet Deacon. It was wordist from the go. He said that disordered sexual desires are thought to be part of same minority as a white in a black country or visa-versa, but not in Gods eyes. That it was Sin. Different from skin color.
But I thought, is it really? Is it not disordered for a black man to have a white wife, or a white man an Asian wife? They will have children who are not really of either race. Is there any highly racially mixed society that does not easily condone every other “disorder”, even supposedly Catholic ones such as Mexico or Brazil?
#2 by Alan B on 11/24/2007 - 11:46 pm
Last Rites can be viewed as one final and undignified effort by the church to strike fear in the hearts of the dying as well as the living. Can one think of anything more degrading than having a dying soul bow down one last time for his master.